9/18/2002 @ 10:00AM

Typing On The Table

One of the great advantages of the personal digital assistant is that it’s small and portable. Its great disadvantage is that it’s difficult to enter data with a stylus.

That fact has led to a parade of curious and occasionally truly innovative add-on keyboards that fold up, slide or are built in to handheld PDAs and wireless phone-PDA combos. But now it seems that the keyboard itself may not have to take physical form in order to be useful.

A California-based startup called
Canesta
is today launching a virtual keyboard that is projected from the face of a PDA or mobile phone onto a flat surface in front of it. Your fingers do the typing on a virtual keyboard as though there was a full-sized keyboard there. The company is announcing the technology at the DEMOmobile Conference, which starts today in La Jolla, Calif.

What makes it work is a technology the company has developed called “electronic perception technology” which tracks a user’s finger movements in three dimensions.

Adding the technology to a phone or PDA requires no accessories, but is intended to be built in to the device by the manufacturer. Canesta has designed a set of chips and a light sensor about the size of a pea that are small enough and cheap enough that manufacturers could add them to their designs without increasing the size significantly–or more importantly, increasing the cost.

The light sensor tracks the movements of fingers in real time and translates them into keystrokes that correspond with a grid of keys that are projected onto whatever flat surface happens to be handy.

We’ve seen something similar before. At last year’s Comdex trade show in Las Vegas (see: “Air Typing Into A PDA“) we ran across a company called
Senseboard Technologies
that had designed devices that attached to the hands and allowed for typing into a PDA. It won a Best of Show award and reminded us of the classic
Jerry
Lewis
Jerry Lewis
typewriting comedy routine from the movie, Who’s Minding The Store?

Canesta’s advantage is the fact that as far as the user is concerned there’s no new hardware to buy or install. But PDA manufacturers are under pressure to add a raft of new features to their devices, all of which require extra components that take up valuable space and add to the always sensitive bill of materials.

Before adding it to their devices–and there’s no word on who will be the first–PDA manufacturers like
Palm
,
Hewlett-Packard
and
Toshiba
as well as wireless phone makers like
Nokia
and
Motorola
, among others, will be sure to put the technology through some tough tests to make sure it works as advertised. If it does, typing on tabletops may become disconcertingly common.